The Attack on the Pentagon

The Military Bounds Back From Sept. 11, and Does It Double-Quick

By ELIZABETH BECKER

Published: October 12, 2001

WASHINGTON, Oct. 11 — Master Warrant Officer Craig Sincock finished his counseling duties for the families of victims on Wednesday. Today he was part of the throng praying outside the Pentagon in a final memorial to the 189 people who died on Sept. 11.

On Friday he will bury his wife, Cheryle.

Her office was directly in the path of the hijacked American Airlines jet that slammed into the newly renovated west wedge of the huge building, and although he feared the worst, Mr. Sincock volunteered for stretcher duty. He recalls watching the building "burn and burn and burn, knowing I was looking at Cheryle's office."

When he received the call one day later notifying him that his 53-year old wife, a Pentagon secretary, had been declared missing, he knew she was dead, he said.

Unable to go back to his job as a chief strategist for the Army's knowledge management office, he volunteered to help other families at the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, one of more than a dozen organizations set up by the Pentagon in a nearby hotel that became a sanctuary for the families.

"This is where I needed to be," Mr. Sincock said this week.

After one month, the Pentagon has completed the job of providing assistance — financial, legal, medical, emotional — to the relatives of the dead and missing. It has cleared the rubble, met its budget deadlines though the Army's budget office was decimated and relocated the Navy's destroyed Command Center, and is now rebuilding the damaged portion of the building.

And it did the job with the same discipline and esprit de corps that enabled it to be back in business within 72 hours of the attack.

Standing outside the damaged building today, President Bush paid homage to the victims in a somber ceremony and then praised the spirit of the survivors.

"I have seen this spirit at the Pentagon before and after the attack on this building," he said. "You've responded to a great emergency with calm and courage, and for that, your country honors you."

From the first explosion to the final good- bye today, the civilians and military members who work in the world's largest office building fell back on years of training to both follow orders and improvise with extraordinary courage in an emergency.

The discipline was evident in the evacuation of 20,000 people within minutes after the attack.

"Our side of the building was hit bad, but there was no pushing, no panic, no shoving, just some bunching up," said Adm. Stephen R. Pietropaoli, the Navy's chief spokesman. "What was extraordinary was how people would shush for quiet whenever there were new announcements over the P.A. system."

The heroics were hidden. Sgt. Maj. Tony G. Rose of the Army was at his desk on the C ring, fourth corridor, where he worked under the command of Lt. Gen. Timothy J. Maude, the highest ranking officer to be killed in the attack.

The room shook like an earthquake and a wall of black smoke rolled over everyone, Sergeant Major Rose, 47, recalled. He heard people screaming above the roar of the explosive fire. "Come to my voice," he answered back. Firewalls were starting to close. But the sergeant major, who had never seen combat, slithered along the floor over broken glass until he found first one, then two, then three and four colleagues, shepherding them to safety on the first floor.

Then he heard more cries for help, this time from a utility closet. A Navy SEAL used his massive body to hold up a supporting wall while the sergeant major and five buddies tunneled their way to the closet, using their wet T-shirts as masks against the smoke. They saved three more people.

It is impossible to estimate how many people were saved in that first hour, but within the halls of the Pentagon it is taken as a given that few other groups of people were better prepared to take care of their own in such an unimaginable attack.

"While no one could have conceived that that kind of catastrophic incident could happen here, there is a military mindset that says you have to be prepared, to recognize you're a potential target and act," said Col. Stephanie Hoehne, the deputy chief of Army public relations.

The military may be accustomed to war and losing comrades, but the civilians who work at the Pentagon had not expected to find themselves in a combat zone. More civilians perished than military members.

When the terrorist hijackers steered the jet into the Pentagon, they managed to kill more accountants than special operations commandos. The worst hit was the budget office of the Army headquarters, which lost all 32 budget analysts and accountants.

"We were utterly decimated," said Robert Jarowski, director of resource services for the office of administrative assistant to the secretary of the Army.

The office had two weeks to close the books on the Army's annual $3 billion budget, a major feat any time but nearly impossible with so many colleagues missing. It did so just in time, using a makeshift crew of temporary accountants and former employees who came out of retirement.

After four weeks of cleaning up debris, searching for bodies and combing the wreckage for evidence, the Pentagon belongs to the Defense Department once again. Gone are the F.B.I. agents, the Red Cross workers, the tents with food for fire and rescue workers.

Diane Stephens of the Red Cross said the Pentagon had created one of the best organized relief efforts she had seen. "Normally we have to do nearly everything, but with all the resources they command we were more like guests here," Ms. Stephens said.

For all of the talk of business as usual, the building is not the same. The halls are infused with the acrid smell of war, not of a simple fire. The famously long corridors are now a sea of camouflage. With the building on alert, the military have been ordered to wear their battle uniforms and give up their dress uniforms and chests of medals. Cordoned off indefinitely is the destroyed west face, which was only five days from completion of a three-year, $258 million renovation.

The officials put in charge of repairing and rebuilding that wedge of the building recently came up with an eerie piece of historic trivia: ground was broken for the original building on Sept. 11, 1941 — 60 years to the day before the only attack on the nation's center of military power.